As a smoker at Iowa State, I am rather perturbed about a letter that was recently published in the Iowa State Daily. The letter in question (published Nov. 3) described one young man’s concern for the set of stairs from Lincoln Way up to the arches of Friley Hall. He described an incident wherein he supposedly “had” to burst in between two young female smokers, when there was already a clear path around them that all other passers-by had figured out how to maneuver through it.

Here is the issue at hand, that issue is the fact that there is no reasonable place for smokers to congregate near campus. The stairs tend to be a sort of commons that attracts people. While I do agree with Andrew Koehring that this generally becomes an obstacle, we generally do try to go out of our way to make sure that there is a pathway so that people can get through with relative ease.

So, how do we solve the issue at hand? Do we let Mr. Koehring “try punting them one by one into the street,” or just stand in the middle of the sidewalk thus causing more obstruction? Or is there a more civil, diplomatic way to dilute this dichotomy? The impression that I got from this letter was that the author thought that our sole goal was to be an impediment. Quite the opposite is true. We honestly just want a place to sit, and enjoy our 10 minutes of bliss that a mere one milligram of nicotine can offer. So far, that place to sit just so happens to be either the stairs or the railings. We would love to have benches to be able to plop our “notoriously thin” keesters on, yet the school is not legally obliged to do so.

Mr. Koehring, I would like us to treat each other as adults. Adults do not use disguised threats through a school newspaper to get what they want, to be honest, your complaint was rather childish and quite frankly was threatening to some of us. The fact that you view us as “an obstacle that has the potential to entirely ruin the functionality of a good set of stairs” shows a complete ignorance that, hey, large groups of people tend to cluster together. Look at the sidewalks on campus in the 10 minutes in between classes. Is that not an obstacle? In that instance, is it perfectly acceptable to just burst through a group of people in a violent matter?

To others that may feel the same way as Mr. Koehring, we offer this piece of advice: A simple “excuse me” is more than enough for us to reshuffle ourselves out of the way of anyone who is willing to get by. If you still suffer under the notion that we are a group of deviants that wish only to impose suffering on other people’s days, why don’t you actually try talking to us? Time and time again, many non-smokers have complimented us on our willingness to just sit and have a chat with somebody about whatever is on their mind. We are not just out there to smoke and be in the way, oftentimes this gathering is a sort of cheap therapy. We never walk away from these steps in an angry fashion, and neither should anyone else.